Recording Drums and Cymbals Separately

[ItalianAvalanche]

Drummers,

I've been researching the merits of and techniques for recording drums and cymbals separately and I would like to hear your input if you have experience doing this. For this discussion lets assume that we are exclusively interested in acoustic drum recordings with no samples and lets skip comments to the effect of "it's not worth it" or "your drummer is going to hate you if you try to do this" because I am the drummer and also the recording engineer. I'll list my gear and setup at the end. The styles I'm interested in are hardcore punk, metal, thrash, etc. My goal is to create bright, explosive drum sounds by combining close mics, overheads, and room mics while avoiding cymbal bleed and washy sounds rushing through gates.

For this discussion I'd like to focus on snare. So far I've been mixing the snare close mic to have a hard attack and I've been using an expander to draw out the sustain on the twangy overtones above 1khz and that sounds killer. Then I'm duplicating the room mic, band-passing it between like 200hz and 4khz, side-chain gating it to the snare close mic, applying hard compression with slow attack fast release, and applying some overdrive/distortion to create an explosive sound. By mixing these two sounds together I'm getting a hard attack, twangy sustain, and explosive body. For the rest of the kit I'm following convention for rock/metal drum sounds.

The problem I'm having is that the room mics pick up the cymbal noise and you can hear the cymbals come through the gates. Conventional wisdom tells me to LPF the room mics which I have been doing hence the 200-4000hz band pass however this then makes the snare sound more dull. It seems like separate drum and cymbal recording could be a solution here.

Here's what I'm considering: Pick up a set of Evans drum and cymbal mutes. Record each track twice: one with drums muted and one with cymbals muted. This should give me tracks for kick, snare top, snare bottom, rack tom, floor tom, overhead left shells only, overhead right shells only, room shells only, overhead left cymbals only, overhead right cymbals only, room cymbals only. Then in theory I can mix the shell mics as bright and hard as I want without cymbal wash coming through the gates.

So what are your thoughts? Will the Evans mutes be adequate? Is a volume reduction good enough or do I need to completely cover the cymbals in moving blankets? Maybe put some moving blanket between the hats? Swap out for mesh drum heads?

Drums:

Mapex V refinished in fancy green dye and lacquer. I believe it's poplar. I also have a Mapex Mars Pro in maple and mahogany but it only has a 20" kick.

Kick:
22x16
Remo clear Powerstroke 3 batter
Remo coated Powerstroke 3 reso with 4" porthole
Homemade steel impact pad
Wood beaters
Trick Dominator pedals
Pillow

Snare: custom 14x5.5 3mm steel with 3mm hoops
Remo coated Controlled Sound batter
Remo hazy Ambassador snareside
Puresound Blaster wires

Rack tom: 12x10
Remo clear Emperor batter
Remo clear Ambassador reso

Floor tom: 16x16
Remo clear Emperor batter
Remo clear Ambassador reso

Cymbals:

13" AAX X-Celerator hats (these are very harsh and overly bright and I'd like to swap them out for 14" HHX X-Celerator)
18" AAX X-Plosion crash
20" AAX X-Plosion crash
20" AAX Medium china
21" AAX Raw Bell Dry ride

Recording Gear:

Kick: Shure Beta 52
Snare top: Shure Beta 57
Snare bottom: Shure SM57
Toms: Shure SM57
Overheads: Shure PGA181
Room: Shure SM4 or SM7B
Interface: Behringer UMC1820
DAW: Ableton Live 11

Setup:

Room: approx. 24'x24' with a 6'x6' L-shaped chunk out of one corner, 7' ceiling with open 2x8 joists, concrete floor, small rug under drums, concrete walls.
Acoustic treatment: four gobos 6.5' tall, 4' wide, 5.5" deep stuffed two layers thick with Rockwool Safe'n'sound at early reflection points plus Rockwool stuffed two layers thick into the joists above the kit.
Kick mic: placed in porthole with a short stand. Aimed at beater impact point. Porthole is centered left-to-right to keep the sound of the left and right beaters similar.
Snare mic: clamped to hoop with A56D clamp high aimed between center of the head and the hoop about 3" off the head.
Tom mics: clamped to hoop with A56D clamps mounted very high with 3" risers aimed almost perpendicular to the head very close to the hoop about 3" off the head.
Overhead mics: XY pair placed close over my head. I would like to experiment with placing these left and right of the kit at chest height.
Room mic: Last time I recorded I placed a SM7B across the room aimed up the stairs. This time I'd like place a gobo about four feet in front of the kit and place the SM4 on the other side of the gobo facing away from the kit.

[drummer]

I’ve played around with separating drums and cymbals too and honestly it can work if you're tight with your playing and know what you're going for. The control you get in the mix, especially on snare and room mics, is insane. Evans mutes will help reduce bleed but probably won’t be enough for full isolation. You’ll still hear cymbal ring in the drum-only takes unless you go further like covering cymbals with blankets or swapping in mesh heads.. Cymbals are just hard to shut up.

If you’re tracking to a click and can nail consistent takes, it’s definitely worth experimenting. It might feel weird at first, but for aggressive styles where punch and clarity matter, it could be a game-changer.

[ItalianAvalanche]

Thanks for the insight. I'm really excited to try it. Have you tried it with just mutes to see what effect it has? Do they really need to be silent or do you think that a good reduction will meet my needs? I do have a load of moving blankets that I could cut up.

[drummer]

I used towels.

[ItalianAvalanche]

Okay I did it. Tl;dr it was very cool, I created WILD sounds (particularly snare), and I thought it was very much worth it but it would cost a lot more to do it at a studio and you need to lay down very tight performances.

I put a ton of towels over the cymbals and recorded just the shells and then I put a bunch of towels over the shells and recorded the cymbals. I'm very confident with these tracks and I still got a bit confused and played some parts that would only be possible with three or four hands. I went back and fixed these either by editing or re-recording.

I ended up using all the equipment listed in the original post but recorded in my dining room with all the furniture removed and walls completely bare. I recorded some samples, did some processing, liked what I heard, and continued on. The room is something like seventeen feet long by fourteen feet wide and nine feet tall. I placed the drums off-center closer to the long wall with the kick drum facing the other long wall about twenty degrees off from perpendicular hoping that this would reduce destructive interference. I placed the close mics in conventionally, placed the overheads in an XY configuration, and placed the room mic (SM4) facing away from the kit into the hallway.

Recording the cymbals seperately let me do some wild things with the production that I think would only be possible with samples due to bleed. For the snare in particular I wanted to combine the pop from the close mic, a "twang" ringy overtone from the close mic, and a blast-like gunshot sound from the room mic. For the pop I used a 75ms gate with conventional compression with slow attack and fast release and about 5db of reduction/comensation. For the twang I used a 200ms gate with outrageous compression to the effect of like 36db reduction and compesation using fast attack and fast release. This would have been a disaster with cymbal bleed due to the long gate and massive gain from the compressor. Even without the cymbals I had to create a side-chain to duck the sound out when other shells were hit because the bleed from the toms and kick created gross distorted sounds. The ducking also helps maintain clarity because it keeps the ringy sound suppressed during fast playing (this is a metal band with lots of fast parts). For the blast sound I set up parallel paths on the room mic - one for each shell and each with their own gate or expander. For the snare I used an aggressive expander to greatly amplify the room track when the snare hit, created a separate EQ which cut a lot of the lows below 1000hz with a low shelf, and slammed it with aggressive saturation to create an explosive white noise sound. After the parallel paths I placed an 1176 style compressor, set it mostly for the toms and kick which were very mild just to create a sense of space and realism, and just let the snare slam into it. The toms and kick had like 5db of reduction and the snare was slamming into it very hard for like 15db reduction but I liked the sound so that's where I left it.

In terms of cymbals I was able to put my high pass filter much lower than would otherwise be possible. I ended up putting it at like 500hz mostly because the ride cymbal was putting out some deep tones that I didn't care for. It's very convenient being able to adjust the cymbal volume completely independantly of the shell volume.

I still had some issues with bleed. In particular with the snare twang sound because I had the gate open so long and the comressor adding so much gain it picked up some noticeable noise from the hi hat and ride cymbal even with the towels over them. This can be fixed with some volume automation or editing. The room mic picked up some muted cymbal noise from me hitting the cymbals with the towels on them. I fixed this by gating the room track with the parallel gates.

A few things I would change next time:

Record in the dining room again but try using the gobos to kill the first reflections. I would place the drums along the short wall with four gobos around the kit and possibly a cloud above. I would place the far side gobo in the middle of the room as opposed to the far wall. I would place stereo room mics on the other side of the gobo facing right and left. I've been thinking about making a riser with built-in absorbers to kill floor reflections. Maybe next time I'll try that.

Stereo room mics. I didn't really know any better and so I only bought one SM4 for room mic. I ended up using a stero delay to create stereo width but this isn't ideal. Next time I'll get another SM4 and get a stereo room sound.

Better overheads. I think next time I'll bite the bullet and grab a pair of SM81 condensers.

[ItalianAvalanche]

I made some changes to my equipment:
- Swapped 13" AAX X-Celerator hats for 14" HHX X-Celerator. These are much more mellow and musical with more body and less harshness
- Used Beta 56 mics instead of SM57 on toms. These aren't hugely different but they picked up more slappy/spanky attack and are hypercardioid so picked up less bleed from other shells
- I used the Shure SM4 large diaphragm condenser for the room and not the SM7B. The SM4 is a nice mic and I recommend especially because Shure's other large diaphragm condensers cost three to four times as much as the SM4.

[drummer]

Hey man, it's exciting that you're getting closer to that ultimate isolation. While I'm not as much a fan of this method, it certainly opens you up to creative recording techniques. And it's great that you yourself are the drummer so you don't have to hear the drummer complain the whole time, ha-ha!